Images edited to protect ONTD audiences.
Article By Alex Bilmes, Photos by Tom Craig edited to make more ONTD friendly by OP.
• It turned out that the notion of watching a TV show was a novelty in itself: Penn has never seen an episode of The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad or any of the other exalted dramas of the past decade or so.
• …after mulling and then rejecting the idea of calling some buddies for a drink (“They’re all in Haiti or Syria”)
• …and I had witnessed then his happy dislocation from current pop culture and technology; he’d squinted with quite magnificent hauteur at an iPad
• A week before our meeting, he had arrived back from Africa, where he’d spent a number of months directing a new film, The Last Face, starring Theron as the director of an international aid agency and Javier Bardem as her medic lover.
• For our interview, he had on a green combat shirt and boot-cut jeans.
• As he began to talk, he swung his cowboy boots onto the table and leaned back, squinting through the double-glazing at the panorama:
• Initially, Penn was lumped in by the press with the Brat Pack, the loose-knit, cool-haired gang of flashy young actors in early Eighties Hollywood…Penn was the baddest bad boy of the bunch. He rode motorbikes. He wore leather. He scowled. He drank. He fell out with directors and studios. He punched paparazzi.
• In Macau in 1986 was arrested after allegedly dangling a paparazzo by his ankles from a ninth floor balcony.
• In 1987, he served 33 days of a 60-day jail sentence – 23 hours a day in solitary confinement – for violating probation he’d been given for punching a fan who tried to get too close to Madonna. The following year, Madonna herself called the police after an argument at their house in Malibu. They divorced in 1989.
• When he was mocked for his activism by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their geopolitical puppet satire Team America: World Police (2004), rather than keep quiet or play along, he sent back a “sincere fuck you” and offered to take Parker and Stone to Baghdad so they could see the situation for themselves, since they found it so funny. He wasn’t kidding.
• I hated school. It was a waste of my fucking time. Preparing me for a life I wasn’t going to live.
• I’m very friendly with my first ex-wife. I would say that I’m on extremely good terms with the children I share with my second ex-wife.
• You say I’ve been married twice before but I’ve been married under circumstances where I was less informed than I am today, so I wouldn’t even consider it a third marriage, I’d consider it a first marriage on its own terms if I got married again
• I’m just another asshole trying to feel good about himself. And why shouldn’t I? That’s what everybody should try to do.
Unedited HI-RES images and long article I almost read all of at the Source: Esquire UK.
